by Walter Lord
By daylight on the 28th the 3rd Division was moving into position. Thanks to Montgomery’s giant side-step, British troops now held the eastern wall of the escape corridor as far north as Noordschote. For the rest of the way to the sea—some thirteen miles—he counted on the remaining Belgians, for they were still in the war, as far as he knew. Then, shortly after 7:30 a.m., he learned for the first time of Leopold’s capitulation.
“Here was a pretty pickle!” Montgomery later recalled in his memoirs. “Instead of having a Belgian Army on my left, I now had nothing. …” He quickly slapped together a scratch force of machine gunners plus some British and French armored cars. These fanned out and held the line until more substantial help could be mustered. It was often touch and go. Lieutenant Mann of the 12th Lancers barely managed to blow the bridge at Dixmude before Bock’s advance entered the town.
Then, in the afternoon, more bad news. The Germans were at Nieuport, the eastern anchor of the perimeter. The Belgians were gone; Montgomery was stretched to the limit; there was no organized unit to defend the line from Wulpen to Nieuport and the sea.
Once more, improvisation. Brigadier A. J. Clifton happened to be available. Brooke packed him off to Wulpen to organize the defense. On arriving, he took over a scratch force of 200 artillerymen, bolstered from time to time by “unemployed” fitters, surveyors, transport drivers, and headquarters clerks. The unit never had a name; the officers came from five different regiments. Most of the men had never seen their officers before, and the officers had never worked with Clifton.
Somehow he welded them together and they marched off to the front in amazingly good spirits. Along the way, they met the disbanded Belgians trooping back. The Belgians were throwing away their weapons and shouting that the war was over. Taking advantage of the windfall, Clifton’s men scooped up the discarded rifles and ammunition, and added them to their own meager arsenal. Positioned along the Furnes-Nieuport canal and the River Yser, they kept the enemy at bay for the next 30 hours. The hottest fighting swirled around the bridge at Nieuport. The Belgians had failed to blow it before the cease-fire, and the British sappers couldn’t reach the demolition wires at the eastern end. Again and again the Germans tried to cross, but Clifton concentrated all his “heavy stuff” (four 18-pounders and some Bren guns) at this point and managed to fend them off. Once again the eastern wall held.
The west held too. At Wormhout, a strong-point twelve miles south of Dunkirk, the British 144th Brigade held off Guderian’s troops all May 27 and most of the 28th. Every man was used. At the local chateau that served as Brigade headquarters, Private Lou Carrier found himself teaching some cooks and clerks how to prime a Mills bomb—even though he had never seen one before in his life.
Successfully completing this hazardous assignment, he was ordered to help man the chateau wall. As he made his way through the garden, he heard a terrible scream. Thinking some poor blighter had been hit, he spun around … and discovered that it came from a peacock perched in a tree.
“That is one bird who will frighten no one else,” Carrier said to himself as he raised his rifle to bring it down. Before he could fire, a young lieutenant knocked the rifle aside, saying that he should know better. Didn’t he realize it was unlucky to shoot peacocks? The officer added that Carrier would be courtmartialed if he disobeyed and shot the bird.
The next step was predictable. Carrier waited until the lieutenant moved out of sight, then took careful aim and fired. If shooting a peacock brought bad luck, he never noticed it.
But a large dose of bad luck did come to some men defending Wormhout who had probably never harmed a peacock in their lives. After a hard fight most of the 2nd Royal Warwicks were broken up and forced to surrender around 6:00 p.m. on the 28th. Prodded by their captors, the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler Regiment, about 80 men and one officer were herded into a small open-ended barn just outside the village.
As they crowded in, the officer Captain J. F. Lynn-Allen protested that there wasn’t enough room for the wounded. Speaking fluent English with a strong American accent, one of the SS guards snapped back, “Yellow Englishman, there will be plenty of room where you’re all going to!”
With that, he hurled a stick grenade into the barn, and the carnage was on. For fifteen minutes the guards blasted away with grenades, rifles, tommy guns, and pistols. As an extra touch two batches of prisoners were brought outside and executed by an impromptu firing squad. Amazingly, some fifteen men somehow survived amid the jumble of bodies.
Eight miles farther south Cassel continued to hold. Perched on its hill, it had become—as Colonel Bridgeman foresaw—the “Gibraltar” of the western wall. For two days Kleist’s tanks, artillery, and mortars battered the town … waves of Stukas pounded it … and still it stood. It was a minor miracle, for the principal defenders—the 5th Gloucesters—had little to fight with. Told to build a barricade, Lieutenant Fane could find only one farm wagon, one plough, a pony trap, and a water cart. When a tank broke into a nearby garden, he tried to stop it with a Boyes rifle—and watched his shots bounce off the armored plate.
The town was surrounded, yet on the evening of May 28 the Gloucesters’ quartermaster Captain R.E.D. Brasington managed to get some rations through. The defenders settled down to an odd meal of bully beef washed down by vintage wine.
All the way south, at the bottom of the pocket, units of General Prioux’s First Army still held Lille. In contrast to most of the French, they fought with passionate commitment, holding off six German divisions … meaning six fewer divisions to harass the BEF farther up the corridor.
Most of the escaping troops were now well on their way. The time had come to abandon the strong-points farthest south, and pull the defending units back toward the coast as a sort of rear guard.
On the morning of the 28th Corporal Bob Hadnett, in charge of dispatch riders at 48th Division headquarters, was ordered to get a message to the troops holding Hazebrouck, one of these southern strong-points. The defenders were to disengage and make for Dunkirk that night. Hadnett had already lost two messengers on missions to Hazebrouck; so this time he decided to go himself.
The main roads were jammed with refugees and retiring troops, but he had been a motorcycle trials driver in peacetime and had no trouble riding cross-country. Bouncing over fields and along dirt lanes, he reached Hazebrouck and delivered his message at 143rd Brigade headquarters. After helping the staff work out an escape route north, he mounted his motorcycle and started back.
This time he ran smack into a German column that was just moving into the area. No way to turn, he decided to ride right through. Bending low over the handlebars, accelerator pressed to the floorboards, he shot forward. The startled Germans scattered, but began firing at him as he roared by.
He almost made it. Then suddenly everything went blank, and when he came to, he was lying in the grass with a shattered leg and hand. An enemy officer was standing over him, and a trooper was holding a bottle of brandy to his lips. “Tommy,” the officer observed in English, “for you the war is over.”
As the British troops streamed up the corridor toward the coast, General Gort’s headquarters moved north too. On May 27 the Command Post shifted from Prémesques to Houtkerque, just inside the French border and only fourteen miles from the sea. For the first time since the campaign began, headquarters was not on the London-Brussels telephone cable. It made little difference: Gort wasn’t there much anyhow.
He spent most of the 27th looking for General Blanchard, hoping to coordinate their joint withdrawal into the perimeter. He never did find him, and finally returned to Houtkerque weary and frustrated at dawn on the 28th. Then, around 11:00 a.m., Blanchard unexpectedly turned up on his own.
There was much to discuss, and Gort began by reading a telegram received from Anthony Eden the previous day. It confirmed the decision to evacuate: “Want to make it quite clear that sole task now is to evacuate to England maximum of your force possible.”
Blanchard was horrifie
d. To the amazement of Gort and Pownall, the French commander hadn’t yet heard about the British decision to evacuate. He still understood that the strategy was to set up a beachhead based on Dunkirk which would give the Allies a permanent foothold on the Continent. Somehow Churchill’s statement to Reynaud on May 26, Eden’s message to the French high command on the 27th, the decisions reached at Cassel and Dover the same day, the information given Abrial and Weygand early on the 28th—all had passed him by. Once again, the explanation probably lay in the complete collapse of French communications.
Now that Blanchard knew, Gort did his best to bring him into line. He must, Gort argued, order Prioux’s French First Army to head for Dunkirk too. Like the BEF, they must be rescued to come back and fight again another day. With the Belgians out of the war, there was no longer any possibility of hanging on. It was a case of evacuation or surrender.
Blanchard wavered briefly, but at the crucial moment a liaison officer arrived from Prioux, reporting that the First Army was too tired to move anywhere. That settled it. Blanchard decided to leave the army in the Lille area.
Gort grew more exasperated than ever. Prioux’s troops, he exclaimed, couldn’t be so tired they were unable to lift a finger to save themselves. Once again, evacuation was their only chance.
Blanchard remained adamant. It was all very well, he observed ruefully, for the British to talk evacuation. “No doubt the British Admiralty had arranged it for the BEF, but the French Marine would never be able to do it for French soldiers. It was, therefore, idle to try—the chance wasn’t worth the effort involved.”
There was no shaking him. He ended by asking whether the British would continue to pull back to Dunkirk, even though they knew that the French would not be coming along. Pownall exploded with an emphatic “OUI!”
Down at French First Army headquarters at Steenwerck a somewhat similar conversation took place that afternoon between General Prioux himself and Major-General E. A. Osborne, commanding the British 44th Division. Osborne was planning the 44th’s withdrawal from the River Lys and came over to coordinate his movements with the French, who were on his immediate left. To his surprise, he learned that Prioux didn’t plan to withdraw at all. Osborne tried every argument he knew—including the principle of Allied solidarity—but he too got nowhere.
Yet Prioux must have had second thoughts, for sometime later that afternoon he released General de la Laurencie’s III Corps, telling them to make for the coast if they could. He himself decided to stay with the rest of his army and go down fighting.
The idea of a gallant last stand—saving the honor of the flag, if nothing else—seemed to captivate them all. “He could only tell us the story of the honor of the drapeaux,” Pownall noted in his diary after hearing it from Blanchard one more time.
“I am counting on you to save everything that can be saved—and, above all, our honor!” Weygand telegraphed Abrial. “Blanchard’s troops, if doomed, must disappear with honor,” the General told Major Fauvelle. Weygand pictured an especially honorable role for the high command when the end finally came. Rather than retreat from Paris, the government should behave like the Senators of ancient Rome, who had awaited the barbarians sitting in their curule chairs.
This sort of talk, though possibly consoling at the top level, did not inspire the poilus in the field. They had had enough of antiquated guns, horse-drawn transport, wretched communications, inadequate armor, invisible air support, and fumbling leaders. Vast numbers of French soldiers were sitting around in ditches, resting and smoking, when the 58th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, passed by on May 28. As one of them explained to a French-speaking Tommy, the enemy was everywhere and there was no hope of getting through; so they were just going to sit down and wait for the Boches to come.
Yet there were always exceptions. A French tank company, separated from its regiment, joined the 1st Royal Irish Fusiliers at Gorre and proved to be a magnificent addition. The crews bristled with discarded British, French, and German weapons and were literally festooned with clanking bottles of wine. They fought with tremendous élan, roaring with laughter and pausing to shake hands with one another after every good shot. When the Fusiliers were finally ordered to pull back, the tank company decided to stay and fight on. “Bon chance!” they called after the departing Fusiliers, and then went back to work.
General de la Laurencie was another exuberant Frenchman not about to fold his tent. Exasperated by the indecision and defeatism of his superiors, on two separate occasions he had already tried to get his III Corps transferred to Gort’s command. Now, released by Prioux, he hurried toward Dunkirk with two divisions.
The first of the fighting contingents were already entering the perimeter. The 2nd Grenadier Guards moved into Furnes, still marching with parade-ground precision. The steady, measured tread of their boots echoed through the medieval market square. Here and there a uniform was torn, a cap missing, a bandage added; but there was no mistaking that erect stance, that clean-shaven, expressionless look so familiar to anyone who had ever watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace.
Not far behind came the 1st/7th Middlesex. They were a Territorial unit far removed from the professionalism of the Guards, but raffishly engaging in their own way. They too had seen their share of rear-guard action. Now they continued through Furnes, finally halting at Oostduinkerke three miles to the east. Here they were a mile or so from Nieuport, the eastern anchor of the perimeter and the point most exposed by the Belgian surrender. Colonel Clifton’s “odds and sods” were already in position, but spread very thin. The Middlesex battalion would beef up the line.
Spreading their camouflage nets and digging slit trenches, the new arrivals settled down in the dunes and scrub. As yet there was no sign of the enemy, and it was wonderful to flake out at last and sleep undisturbed. The war of movement had ended, and until the Regimental Sergeant-Major, “Big Ike” Colton, caught up with them and devised some new torment, it was a chance to soak up oceans of missed sleep. Private Francis Ralph Farley only hoped that “Big Ike” didn’t find them too soon.
General Gort was also moving into the perimeter. At 6:00 p.m., May 28, GHQ opened up at La Panne, housed in a beachside villa at the western end of town. The place was well chosen. It had been the residence of King Albert during the dark days of the First War, and later served as a summer home for the old King during the twenties. As a result it had a large, reinforced cellar, ample wiring, and the London-Brussels telephone cable, which ran practically by the front door. Once again Gort was only a phone call away from Churchill, the War Office, and Ramsay at Dover.
The Corps commanders also moved into the perimeter on the 28th: III Corps at Dunkirk, II Corps at La Panne, and I Corps in between at Bray-Dunes. Lieutenant-General Michael Barker, commanding I Corps, was by now utterly exhausted. An elderly veteran of the Boer War, he was no man to cope with a blitzkrieg. Reaching corps headquarters at the western end of the beach promenade, he retired to the cellar. From here he constantly called up to his assistant quartermaster, Major Bob Ransome, to come and tell him what was going on.
Ransome found the scene on the beach appalling. A mob of officers and men from various service units milled around, firing haphazardly at German planes. Ransome tried to get the crowd into some sort of order but had no luck, even though he jammed his pistol into some very senior ribs. Finally he sent for Captain Tom Gimson, an assistant operations officer at III Corps headquarters. Gimson was an old Irish Guardsman, and his solution was to order the mob to fall in, as on parade. He then solemnly drilled them, running through all the usual commands. Surprisingly, the men complied, and order was soon restored. To Ransome the incident revealed not only what drill could accomplish but also the workings of that most austere of human mechanisms, a Guardsman’s mind.
Reports of the confusion at Bray-Dunes soon reached Captain Tennant, busy organizing the embarkations at Dunkirk. So far he had no naval shore parties operating that far up the beach. But the eastern mole
and Malo-les-Bains were now under control, and clearly Bray was the next problem to tackle. There were said to be 5,000 troops there, most without officers or any leadership.
Around 5:00 p.m. on the 28th Tennant met with Commander Hector Richardson and two of his other officers, Commanders Tom Kerr and Campbell Clouston. He explained that he wanted an officer to lead a party to Bray and embark the 5,000 men waiting there. At the moment all three commanders were available; so they decided to cut a deck of cards for the assignment—loser to get Bray-Dunes. Richardson lost, but said it was such a big job he really needed another officer to go with him. Kerr and Clouston then cut again. This time Kerr lost. Clouston, the “winner,” took what all three considered the easiest assignment—pier master of the mole.
Richardson and Kerr then set off for Bray with fifteen men in a lorry. It was only seven miles, but the roads were so clogged with traffic and pitted with craters that it took an hour to get there. Arriving around 9:00 p.m., the party headed down to the beach to start organizing the embarkation.
It was dusk now, and in the fading light Seaman G. F. Nixon saw what he first thought were several breakwaters, extending from the sand out into the water. Then he realized that the “breakwaters” were actually columns of men, eight thick, leading from the shore right into the sea. The men in front were standing up to their waists, and even to their shoulders, in water.